This invention relates to an apparatus for dyeing automatically specimens such as pieces of tissue or cell attached to a piece of slide glass preparatory to microscopic examination.
In a hospital or laboratory, specimens taken out of an affected part of a patient are often examined by a microscope to find a cause of his disease. In order to facilitate microscopic examination, the specimens attached to a piece of slide glass are usually dyed. There have appeared a variety of apparatuses for carrying out automatically a dyeing operation.
In these conventional apparatuses, a plurality of vessels each containing a kind of reagent are placed on a table and each slide glass with a specimen is immersed in each vessel in a prescribed order.
As dyeing methods, HE method, MASSON method, etc. are well known. A suitable dyeing method must be selected depending on kind of specimens or cells to be investigated.
However, each conventional apparatus can carry out only one specific dyeing method and cannot carry out a plurality of dyeing methods by itself because different reagents and structures are required depending on kind of dyeing methods. Accordingly, in order to dye many kinds of specimens, a plurality of dyeing apparatus must be prepared thereby to require much cost and a wide space.